Tim Stevens - Severance Kill

She couldn’t go in after him herself. She would stick out as though she were radioactive. And she wanted Tamarkin out here as well, in the other car, in case either the Fiat departed and needed following, or Calvary left the restaurant on the run. Not that she had any idea what he was doing there in the first place.

So she had sent Arkady in. He was young and trendy enough to be inconspicuous in a setting like this restaurant.

Arkady was trying to update them, but the overwhelming noise coming through his feed made his words unintelligible. In a moment a text message came through from him. Can’t see the target, but there’s some sort of scuffle going on upstairs.

She texted back, her fingers labouring over the tiny keys. Men pouring in. Keep out of the way. Safety first.

Part of her hoped he’d ignore her.

*

In the booth, Janos started to speak. Calvary cut across him loudly.

‘Hand over your prisoner and we’ll forget about — ’

He didn’t finish the thought because it was always a surprise to the opponent when you attacked while you yourself were in mid-sentence, just as it was when you hung up a phone and cut your own voice off. Calvary shot out his arm and grabbed one of the trays from the waitress, hoping like hell it didn’t spill on to her. She was grasping it loosely and he managed to snatch it away, brought it whipping across and tilted it at the same time so that the glasses of burning sambucca sprayed into the booth like tiny splintering fireworks. He continued the movement of his arm and the edge of the tray cracked into the face of the man at his side with the gun. The burning spirits wouldn’t cause any real damage but they had shock value and would impart pain. It bought Calvary enough time to use his legs to piston himself off the outer wall of the booth and crash blindly backwards into the man behind him, who went down, shouting. Calvary twisted round and gripped the gun-arm by the wrist and gave it a quick rotational jerk. The man screamed. Calvary caught the gun with his other hand and hauled himself up, dragged the gunman across in front of him.

The momentum of his pistoning action had driven Calvary back towards the steps and the two men outside the booth had been slow to react, so they were only now coming forward. Calvary yelled at them to stay back as he got a forearm across the gunman’s throat and jammed the ba cjamnowrrel of the pistol in his ear.

Pandemonium now as the patrons started to see the gun and began funnelling towards the steps. Calvary moved aside to let them pass. On the floor below, people were starting to notice and point up at them.

Calvary stood, his back to the stairs, hoping to Christ there weren’t any more of them down there, his arm exerting pressure on the gunman’s trachea so that he hissed and gasped. The shark’s fin of the pistol sight cut into the external canal of his ear. Five or six feet away ahead and to the right and left were Janos’s cronies, the women screaming and cowering behind them. All three of the cronies had drawn handguns, all attempts at discretion discarded. In the booth Janos had risen and was roaring, wiping at his neck and face with a handkerchief. Another man was leaning on the table in the booth, clutching his face and moaning.

On the floor below, the diners were on their feet, women screaming, a wedge of panicking bodies driving towards the doors.

Calvary moved quickly, shuffling back and dragging the gunman with him, slipping his fingers inside his suit jacket and coming out with a wallet and putting it in his own pocket before getting his arm around his neck once more. The gunman was trying to nurse his injured wrist with his other hand, a pathetic keening issuing from between his clenched teeth. Calvary assumed they would be more circumspect about shooting at him once he was down among the crowd. Not that he thought they’d give a damn about civilian casualties as such, but it would be bad public relations.

In two movements Calvary put his foot in the small of the gunman’s back and kicked him forward before using both legs to launch himself in a backward flip over the banister of the balcony. Deliberately falling backwards was a highly unnatural manoeuvre for a human being to carry out and he’d never been especially good at this type of acrobatics, but he didn’t exactly have a lot of options available.

Someone fired, and they were close because he felt the whine of the bullet past his face as he dropped into space. He got the move almost right and landed on his feet, but with the centre of gravity off so that he was leaning backwards, arms wheeling. He tumbled back, landed on his backside on one of the abandoned tables, found his balance once more and plunged low into the crowd struggling for the exit, keeping himself at the height of their waists. It might have been putting them at a terrible risk, but Calvary had calculated that the men up on the mezzanine wouldn’t start firing indiscriminately into the crowd as long as he was completely hidden in its midst. As he moved he thumbed the safety on the pistol and pushed it into the pocket of his jacket.

Someone in the throng had seen him land with the gun, and there was yet another renewed wave of screaming as the crowd started parting for him. It was making him more visible. Calvary saw them, then, at least four men, possibly six, forcing their way in against the outflow of the crowd. Clearly Janos’s crew, though God knew how they’d managed to arrive at the club so quickly.

Calvary got rough then, shoving his way through the crowd at a stumble, angling away from the direction of the exit and towards the row of low windows set in the wall facing the street. He could feel the presence of Janos’s men behind him on the floor as he broke free on the perimeter of the crowd and tucked his head down to turn himself into as much of a ball as he could.‹ coulke /span›

He dived straight at the window.

The pane gave in a cascade of fragments that flashed brilliantly in the neon vista outside as Calvary burst onto the street and hit the pavement hard, rolling on his shoulder. He sprang to his feet, feeling the tiny insect-stings of shards in his cheeks and neck. In the heat of the moment it was difficult to tell if he had been cut badly.

Passers-by reeled away in astonishment and the part of the clientele that had barged its way through the exit shouted and pointed. He turned left down the street and ran without looking back. He was aware that he was more exposed out there than he had been in the restaurant.

Calvary pounded along the pavement, at one point cannoning off a stout man in evening wear and catching his angry shout in his slipstream. He suddenly veered off the pavement on to the road and although it wasn’t particularly busy he managed only by a few inches not to get his knee smashed by the bumper of a taxi cab. Then he was dodging cars in a maelstrom of horns and contorted faces until he made it to the other side and dived right down a narrow sidestreet. The narrowness of focus was almost exhilarating. Nothing mattered now, nothing , except that he get as far away from the restaurant as possible.

Finally Calvary ducked into an alley and leaned with his hands on his knees and sucked long, gulping breaths, his face stinging and his hammer-blow heart threatening to pound a hole in his chest. He took stock.

He was alive. He had a wallet belonging to one of the enemy. An extra gun.

And he knew he’d been set up.

‘Target has left the building.’

Yevgenia’s voice in her ear pulled Krupina back from the sight on the pavement. The doors of the restaurant had been broken off their hinges by the press of bodies. People were spilling and sprawling out.

Sirens cut the air, high above the hubbub.